People's attitudes toward others' positive self-presentations and demotivation self-presentations on SNS

People tend to make positive self-presentations on social networking sites (SNS). We aim to compare people's attitudes toward others' positive self-presentations on SNS and its mechanism. The sample in Experimental 1 included 71 Chinese college students. We measured participants' attitudes to others' positive self-presentation, life details self-presentation, and demotivation self-presentation on SNS. Results from Experiment 1 showed that participants preferred others' life details self-presentations over positive self-presentations, and mostly disliked demotivation self-presentations. In Experiment 2, with another sample, we tested idealization, perceived interpersonal distance, stress, anxiety, and depression as mediators of participants' attitudes toward others' positive self-presentation. The results suggested that feelings of depression and interpersonal distance play a mediating role in the relationship between the self-presentation types and people's likability of these posts. The results have implications for understanding why people dislike positive self-presentations on SNS. Positive self-presentations lead people to feel more depressed and far interpersonally distanced from the sharer, and thus they are less likely to like positive self-presentation.